He calls himself an ethical hacker who helps companies and individuals fight back against the bad guys operating online. Over the years, Charles Tendell also has emerged as a commentator in the news media about the threat posed by overseas hackers and is a former co-host of an online radio show about security. But behind the scenes, Mr. Tendell, a Colorado resident and a decorated Iraq War veteran, started a new website called Hacker’s List that allows people to anonymously post bids to hire a hacker. Many users have sought to find someone to steal an email password, break into a Facebook account or change a school grade. Mr. Tendell, 32, who owns a consulting firm in Denver called Azorian Cyber Security, confirmed on Tuesday that he was the sole owner of the website. He said Hacker’s List, which began as something of an “off the cuff idea,” grew far faster than he anticipated. “I never expected it to turn into what it is,” said Mr. Tendell, a graduate of the University of Phoenix who became certified as an information systems security professional and an ethical hacker in 2011. “I was testing the waters and wanted to see if it …

Two Florida men are facing some serious felony charges that intersect both Bitcoin and the money transfer business. According to federal authorities, Anthony R. Murgio and Yuri Lebedev never bothered to get a Money Services Business license for Coin.mx, a Bitcoin exchange. The FBI’s statement on the matter calls Coin.mx / Collectables Club a “phony front business” and mentions that the men also utilized a federal credit union that they bought solely for the purpose of washing dirty money. In doing so, they knowingly exchanged cash for people whom they believed may be engaging in criminal activity. MURGIO and his co-conspirators have also knowingly exchanged cash for Bitcoins for victims of “ransomware” attacks, that is, cyberattacks in which criminals (here, distributors of the ransomware known as “Cryptowall”) electronically block access to a victim’s computer system until a sum of “ransom” money, typically in Bitcoins, is paid to them. In doing so, MURGIO, and his co-conspirators knowingly enabled the criminals responsible for those attacks to receive the proceeds of their crimes, yet, in violation of federal anti-money laundering laws, MURGIO never filed any suspicious activity reports regarding any of the transactions. It goes on to allege that they willfully hid their …

This is a great time to be really honest with yourself! Because if you’re not worried about your security between you, all the hard work that you’ve put in to get to where you are today, then don’t be surprised or say you weren’t informed when someday you login to find you’ve been compromised. So do………..? You use the same password on all websites you are registered with. Your password is too short. Let’s take each case and from a hackers point see what he or she can do with current technology. 1. You use the same password on all websites you have registered with. This means if one site you use is breached i.e. your password is leaked the attacker can access every site you own Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Paypal and everything else. Secondly, a dishonest or incompetent website owner might store your password in plain text. Then if you register with that site the owner can take your password and email and try different websites to see if you have an account there. 2. Your password is too short. With current technology and say your password is something like “dinky1”, a computer programm can try all combinations of …

Stanford professor David Mazières thinks he has a faster, more flexible and more secure alternative to Bitcoin, MIT Technology Review reports. Two independent reviewers, from Stanford and Cornell universities, agree that the new technology could make digital payments and other transactions cheaper, safer and easier. Alternative blockchains are often dismissed as worthless “me-too” copycats or scamcoins, which, unfortunately, has some element of truth. But Mazières’ approach deserves a place among the serious alternatives to Bitcoin that have been proposed, alongside Ethereum and Ripple. Public digital currency ledgers rely on distributed consensus protocols to propagate valid transactions. In the Bitcoin network, independent nodes (miners) work together without preferential trust relations. In other words, each node implicitly trusts every other node. In the new protocol, called Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), each node explicitly selects a set of publicly trusted peers, and forwards only the transactions that have been validated by a certain majority of its trusted partners. If correctly implemented with a critical mass of nodes with overlapping trust circles, valid transactions propagate in ripples through the network and eventually achieve systemwide consensus. “Bitcoin is good, but we wanted to start from scratch,” says Mazières. He is persuaded that the SCP can …